If you have an interest in ancient history, this is a really good GE to take. It's not unreasonably hard, and the workload is not bad at all. You really have to attend lectures if you want to do well, but if you attend lecture, you will have already done the majority of the work you will need to do. The professor covers everything you need to know in his lectures, and I didn't feel any need to read the textbook. The exams are really just about memorization, and the professor sends out a study guide with everything that will be on the exam a week before each exam. The hardest thing about the exam is that you have to memorize dates, or else you will lose a lot of points. As someone who enjoys learning about history, I found the lectures were really interesting and I learned a lot through this class.

TL/DR: Enjoyed this class. Fair amount of reading, but the exams are pretty fair and if you are a good note-taker you will be able to do well in the class. Definitely recommend for history majors or people looking for a good GE where you will be able to learn a breadth of knowledge you might need to know.

Full Review with grading/material/etc info here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15vILblHwWrnV7KnB-sOFzTRnQE2QPA7nmHxj4gdNKBU/edit?usp=sharing

Prof Phillips is extremely dull. Lectures often have one or two slides with no information on them, so you have to listen extremely closely to what he says. This is difficult in part because of all the ancient greek words that are used, so you don't know how they're spelled. He has some dry humor he throws in maybe once per class, which is admittedly pretty funny, but otherwise he's very stern. When I asked questions after class he was always very dismissive. The class also is extremely broad, so it's impossible to gain that much insight into the time periods. Pros: His periodical humor, his two tone doc martins. Cons: mean and boring, hard to follow, way too much material to cover.

I am selling the PDF version of the textbook for this class (Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean, 3rd Edition) for $10. Text me at ********** if interested, I accept venmo as payment.

If I had a nickel every time a person with Phillips as a surname taught me history, I'd have two. It's strange that it happened twice, but I do respect him greatly.

Professor Phillips is incredibly lecture oriented. I think my best advice to future students is to go to lecture, every lecture, and take detailed notes of everything that comes out of his mouth. He makes lectures rather engaging but everything he says is pretty much all important and you will be tested on it. His slides are usually just images so I did not find them incredibly helpful, and while there he posts bullet points on what each lecture will be about, they are also pretty vague and should be treated more as a broad overview.

His test structure is when I took the class as follows, though he may switch it up for future quarters so please take with a grain of salt.

Firstly are definitions. There will be a list of 32-40 terms such as "Gaius Gracchus" or "Homer" or "Battle of Marathon" handed out to you beforehand. In the exam he will select randomly 8 of these terms and you will be required to define 5 of them with around a paragraph each. He will ask you to write the date of everything that occurs, such as when events happened or when someone ruled, etc. Be as specific as possible. It's not as bad as it sounds because it is also very easy to predict which terms are more likely to be tested than others, which are the ones that he spends the most time talking about during lecture. You can pretty much half the list by identifying which ones are more important.

The second part is an essay part. He also releases the potential essay questions beforehand, with four total possible. On the exam he will select two of the four and you pick one to write an answer to, so I would just prepare significantly for three questions and skip the one I liked the least. These questions often are mirrors of discussion questions.

Lastly he will give an extra credit question, usually about a statistic or factoid or some other from lecture(another good reason to take detailed notes). There are no half points for this part so you cannot ballpark anything.

As for materials, there is a lot of reading. The weekly assigned readings will be used during discussion, so it's nice to read them ahead of time. There is also a very simple group project that asks you to create a slide on one of the weekly readings and to present it during lecture. The TA's will release questions for you to consider while doing the readings and we answer these questions together during discussion. The TA answers to these questions are important and often reveal what the professor might be looking for in definition paragraphs or essay work on the tests.

I will say the one unfortunate part of this class is that part of the assigned readings are on Bruin one Access and seemlingly cannot be obtained elsewhere. There is also a separate 30 dollar charge for a small coursebook containing some other readings like the Law of Hammurabi and Story of Sinuhe, but I would say those are not worth it as much as the spiral bound book from One Access and to just search those up. I have seen other students complete the course just fine without either.

Professor Phillips lectures are very boring. He just stands there for 50 minutes not making the lecture interesting with 2 pictures on each slide and no information given. The midterms and final are just memorization, so if you are good at that, this is a good GE to take. I did not go to most of the lectures and got B+'s on all of my tests since the study guide is straight forward. Overall, I would not recommend this class if you are not good at memorizing dates and context of historical events.

To begin, I am a History minor so I may have a different perspective than most that take this class as a GE. TBH this class wasn't really that bad. To start with the negatives, the lectures are SO boring. This man just talks non stop for 50 mins in kind of a monotonous voice with unhelpful slide visuals so you really have to write down everything he says in order to have any idea of what he's gonna put on the test. Because of this, the lectures are not very skippable unless you know people in the class who can send you their notes. I also really didn't enjoy discussion, but my TA Dani was very lenient with participation and the attendance policy is incredibly fair. I think you could miss 3 discussions without any penalty on your grade which was really nice. I would say the main positive from this class are the tests. They are incredibly memorization heavy but in the words of someone I took this class from "Professor Philips isn't a dick." All of the key terms/essay questions that he chooses to include are either really light or stuff that we've talked about a ton in class. For example I think in the first test some of the key terms were Pyramids of Giza, Ark of the Covenant, Hatshepsut, and three different characters from Gilgamesh. All of these are really easy objects or people (characters) that he talked about extensively. At the end of the quarter our test didn't even include Julius Caesar or Augustus because they are figures with so much dense information which was really appreciated. The IQs are graded really harshly but (again) they're pretty simple and the essays are graded really fairly. I think the most I ever missed was like 2 points and I'm not Shakespeare. Just write your essay theses ahead of time and you should be fine. Also, although he's boring, I did kind of like Professor Phillips. He has this sort of history aura and he can be kind of funny when he chooses. Okay those are all my thoughts on this class.

If you're looking for a GE to take, this class definitely isn't going to be the easiest, but it wasn't terrible either. Unless you are passionate about ancient history in general, you'll probably find this class quite boring like I did. I'll break down some of my biggest complaints for this class:

1. Lecture: Phillips' lectures are very unengaging. It is straight up just 50 minutes of him talking nonstop. The worst part is, the slides that he projects doesn't have an ounce of information on them, just pictures. You are also not allowed to record his lectures (though honestly he doesn't really enforce this rule). This means that the only legit way to get the notes is by typing down every word he says verbally. He speaks at a moderately-fast pace too, so you might want to get your typing speed up for this class. Once again, his lectures are very boring and by the 20 minute mark I found myself exhausted from typing and unwilling to continue following along. The professor was also pretty curt and standoffish, he didn't really want to interact with any students. Though he is very clear when he is speaking so you'll be able to understand him most of the time.

2. Discussion: While discussion is only once a week, you will always have a considerable amount of reading assigned for discussion every week. The readings were honestly long and boring. I was never really motivated to actually do the readings (aside from week 1). My advice would be to just try your best to at least skim and do some light annotating of the readings and write bullet-pointed notes for each of the discussion questions (which are posted before discussion). In the discussion itself, your TA will just be going over these questions, so as long as you have some answer prepared for some of the questions, you will be fine. I honestly didn't participate that much and still got full points on discussion participation. I really liked my TA, he was basically the only good thing to come out of this class. He was very knowledgeable and you could tell he actually cared that we learned and he always wanted to help. Shoutout Ryan.

3. Exams: For our quarter, the grading system was 25% Midterm 1, 25% Midterm 2, 25% Final, and 25% Discussion Participation. If you notice, 75% of your grade is from your performance on exams. There is literally no other graded assignment besides the exams and the discussion participation. It can be good because it means theres no homework (besides the reading), but you will really need to put time into studying for the tests. His tests work quite simply: He gives you a study guide before each exam. The study guide lists between 35-45 Identifiations (IDs) which are just persons/places/things from the unit of study. There is also an essay section, and the study guide lists 4 possible essay questions. These essay questions are all related to the discussion readings. On the test, he will choose 8 of those IDs and 2 of the essay questions to put on the exam. Of the 8 IDs, you answer 5 of them (of your choosing) and 1 of the essay questions. You get an hour for the exam, which in my opinion is just enough time. When you answer the IDs, you basically have to describe everything the professor said about the ID in lecture, so make sure you have really good notes. Oh and also you will need to memorize the exact years/dates of relevancy for each ID, you will get points off if you don't include the dates. So the exams are very memorization heavy. In fact, that's all they are. Memorization. My advice is to use flashcards when studying and really hone it in on memorizing all the important facts/details for each ID. For the essay, just brainstorm outlines for 3 of the 4 possible essays and remember the outlines. I spent so so much time studying for these exams. The amount of memorization required is mind-numbing. The one saving grace to these exams is that the TAs tend to grade the tests quite leniently, especially with the essays. They usually won't dock off too many points unless you really screw up/forget. The averages for each of the tests were a mid-high B, which was honestly really surprising to me.

So if you're going to take this class, be prepared to put in a lot of time into it. And be prepared for it to be boring.

Prof Phillips' lectures were clear and concise, you can tell he knows exactly what he's talking about. He doesn't ask the class questions, he doesn't do iclicker, he just goes through the slides (which are mainly images and dates so really pay attention to what he's saying) and explains the topics. Exams/midterms/finals aren't too hard, very much memory based (remembering vocab, key figures, dates) as it is a history class. He has a dry sense of humor which I think is under appreciated. I would recommend this class as a GE, just make sure you don't procrastinate studying, and go to lecture even though it isn't counted towards a grade. Maybe reconsider taking this class with Phillips if you're a hands on or visual learner. This class is a lot of listening and reading (still manageable, imo)

The class was divided equally into two midterms, one final, and discussion section participation. Dr. Phillips was a good and clear lecturer - he would arrive promptly and lecture nonstop for the duration of the 50 mins without taking questions, but he is a clear communicator/lecturer and follows a lecture outline that he provides before class, giving sufficient information on every key topic/event/figure. It was apparent that he has been teaching and refining this course for many years, as his lectures were very thorough and smooth. However, he does go through all the material very efficiently, meaning that you'll have to stay very concentrated throughout the class in taking notes. His dry humor was an extra touch that made lectures very engaging (as a history enthusiast).

The midterms/final were not cumulative, and each covered a separate historical era/civilization(s) (midterm 1 was on the Mesopotamian Civilizations and Egypt, midterm 2 was Greece, final was on Rome), and consisted of 8 key terms (usually a key historical figure or event/conflict) which you could choose 5 to define, and 2 essay prompts which you could choose 1. He provided a study guide a week in advance with a pool of possible key terms that he could select, as well as 4 potential essay prompts, allowing students to prepare/study ahead of time.

The exams were honestly just how well you were able to absorb and regurgitate facts that he mentioned, so they should be quite straightforwards if you're good at that. Writing DATES are key, and taking notes during lecture is the BEST RESOURCE (since he doesn't record lectures).

Discussion section was just discussing the primary sources assigned that week. My TA, Ryan Saputo, was awesome and knew a lot about the material!!!!